|
To "live at ease" is There; and, to these divine beings,
verity is mother and nurse, existence and sustenance; all that is
not of process but of authentic being they see, and themselves in
all: for all is transparent, nothing dark, nothing resistant;
every being is lucid to every other, in breadth and depth; light
runs through light. And each of them contains all within itself,
and at the same time sees all in every other, so that everywhere
there is all, and all is all and each all, and infinite the
glory. Each of them is great; the small is great; the sun, There,
is all the stars; and every star, again, is all the stars and
sun. While some one manner of being is dominant in each, all are
mirrored in every other.
Movement There is pure [as self-caused] for the moving principle
is not a separate thing to complicate it as it speeds.
So, too, Repose is not troubled, for there is no admixture of the
unstable; and the Beauty is all beauty since it is not merely
resident [as an attribute or addition] in some beautiful object.
Each There walks upon no alien soil; its place is its essential
self; and, as each moves, so to speak, towards what is Above, it
is attended by the very ground from which it starts: there is no
distinguishing between the Being and the Place; all is Intellect,
the Principle and the ground on which it stands, alike. Thus we
might think that our visible sky [the ground or place of the
stars], lit, as it is, produces the light which reaches us from
it, though of course this is really produced by the stars [as it
were, by the Principles of light alone, not also by the ground as
the analogy would require].
In our realm all is part rising from part and nothing can be more
than partial; but There each being is an eternal product of a
whole and is at once a whole and an individual manifesting as
part but, to the keen vision There, known for the whole it is.
The myth of Lynceus seeing into the very deeps of the earth tells
us of those eyes in the divine. No weariness overtakes this
vision, which yet brings no such satiety as would call for its
ending; for there never was a void to be filled so that, with the
fulness and the attainment of purpose, the sense of sufficiency
be induced: nor is there any such incongruity within the divine
that one Being there could be repulsive to another: and of course
all There are unchangeable. This absence of satisfaction means
only a satisfaction leading to no distaste for that which
produces it; to see is to look the more, since for them to
continue in the contemplation of an infinite self and of infinite
objects is but to acquiesce in the bidding of their nature.
Life, pure, is never a burden; how then could there be weariness
There where the living is most noble? That very life is wisdom,
not a wisdom built up by reasonings but complete from the
beginning, suffering no lack which could set it enquiring, a
wisdom primal, unborrowed, not something added to the Being, but
its very essence. No wisdom, thus, is greater; this is the
authentic knowing, assessor to the divine Intellect as projected
into manifestation simultaneously with it; thus, in the symbolic
saying, Justice is assessor to Zeus.
[Perfect wisdom] for all the Principles of this order, dwelling
There, are as it were visible images protected from themselves,
so that all becomes an object of contemplation to contemplators
immeasurably blessed. The greatness and power of the wisdom There
we may know from this, that is embraces all the real Beings, and
has made all, and all follow it, and yet that it is itself those
beings, which sprang into being with it, so that all is one, and
the essence There is wisdom. If we have failed to understand, it
is that we have thought of knowledge as a mass of theorems and an
accumulation of propositions, though that is false even for our
sciences of the sense-realm. But in case this should be
questioned, we may leave our own sciences for the present, and
deal with the knowing in the Supreme at which Plato glances where
he speaks of "that knowledge which is not a stranger in something
strange to it"- though in what sense, he leaves us to examine and
declare, if we boast ourselves worthy of the discussion. This is
probably our best starting-point.
|
|